This weekend racist pundit John Derbyshire lost his column at the National Review for being more direct with his racism than that magazine allows. We reached out to Derbyshire and Taki's Magazine executive editor Mandolyna Theodoracopulos, who is ostensibly responsible for publishing Derb's racist article, for comment. Mandolyna, the daughter of Taki's Magazine namesake and "soi disant anti-semite" Taki Theodoracopulos, responded thusly:

Yesterday political web magazine Taki's Magazine published a stunning work of overt racism by…
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In my opinion the tragedy is not so much about racism as it is about the shameful incident itself. When a young man kills a boy, it is nothing more than madness and madness diminishes us all.

Plainly, Derbyshire's is a frank point of view that is certainly not shared by everyone. As such, one man's contribution to the debate should not eclipse the loss of an American boy and draw us away from managing our shock and grief over the shooting. The outpouring of support and solidarity behind Martin and his family is certainly more worthy of the public's attention.

We emailed back and forth, with Mandolyna ignoring my every specific question about race and editorial decisions at Taki's. "We ran the piece because that is what we are in the business of doing," she wrote. She did, however, offer a relevant piece of information when I asked for help reaching Derbyshire:

He is undergoing chemo therapy today, as he has every Monday for the past several weeks.

In other Derbyshire-related news, I'd just like to point everyone to his personal website where Derbyshire reveals scientific results providing that he has "a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American" and very little prejudice against Asian Americans.

The latter result may be related to the fact that John used to live in China. He had a bit role in a 1972 Bruce Lee movie, in which he plays a "Thug" and gets the shit kicked out of him. (He's in the striped shirt.) In 1986 he went through the laborious process of extracting wife Rosie Qi from a "work unit" in northeastern China to marry her. He brought her to New York where "we went to a wedding parlor in New York's Chinatown and spent a happy hour or so dressing up and getting photographed," the results of which he published on his website. The couple has been happily married ever since, and have two mixed race children.

Update: Taki Theodoracopulos responds to the controversy: "I don't think he did anything that extraordinary, to point out what Blacks themselves point out." Also, "it's nice to be light sometimes."